The latest theme of those who oppose guns seems to be suicide (e.g. here). All those naughty guns lying around makes people pop themselves off, apparently. So the USA with all its guns must be the leading country for suicides?

Far from it. The USA is well down on the list. It comes in at no. 34 on the list of suicides per head. If you indulged in the sort of shallow reasoning that Leftists use, you could in fact conclude that having guns around generates a PROTECTIVE effect against suicide.

John Jay Ray is a brilliant academic and successful businessman. He created Gun Watch and a number of other blogs to overcome the bias in the MSM. This small note on the direction of the anti-freedom forces in the US does not do justice to the power of his intellect. I highly recommend "THE MOTIVATIONS OF POLITICAL LEFTISTS".

What strikes me most about that country/suicide list is not any particular positive correlation with the availability of guns, but the apparent (remember, if it looks significant, it probably is) strong statistical significance of suicide and the form of government one lives under or the social rigidity of the culture one finds oneself in. Less freedom and less opportunity (or a recent history of such) has far more to do, or so it seems, with a high suicide rate than the availability of guns. OTOH, the most extreme and uncompromising religious taboos against suicide, as in muslim countries, seem to place countries near the bottom of the list, despite social rigidity and lack of opportunity (not to mention prevalence of guns). It’d be fascinating to do an ANOVA on all of the countries of the world. And it might make for a very nice Master’s thesis for all you budding statisticians and sociologists out there (except the libs on your committee would probably eviscerate you).

When they object to suicide, point out that they are objecting to euthanasia, and that far more lives would be saved by outlawing euthanasia than by outlawing guns.

If they argue that the two are not the same, then point out that in Britain, they have legalized medical murder, and even pay hospitals bonuses based on how many people they murder. Some 30,000 people are murdered this way in Britain now, every year. That is just slightly less in little Britain than the number of people killed by guns each year in the US.

Another difference being that those who are murdered in Britain are innocent people, murdered by those who previously swore an oath to do no harm, while many of those killed by guns in the US richly deserved it.

I thought the libs were forever bleating about overpopulation and the need to limit the spread of humanity. People volunteering to pay the ultimate price to reduce overpopulation should be honored, not disparaged. In fact, I wish more environmentalists would do just that since they obviously believe mankind is the scourge of the planet.

What makes it all the more horrifying is that it represents a change in “deevolutionary socialism”. To explain, going back to the early 19th Century, “proto-socialism” had developed the theory of an “elect” or “elite” pseudo-nobility, the 10% of mankind that should rule over the other 90%, the peasant masses, serfs or peons.

This “1 in 10” ratio continued through several iterations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson imagined a de-evolved civilization, where man is reduced to living in isolated peasant villages, and whose efforts to civilize themselves would be thwarted by elite, itinerant “Orphic Poets” (in a 1 to 10 ratio), who would deceive them into remaining primitive and agrarian. And they would be grateful to the Poets for keeping them down. (And this vision is not remarkably different than that of eco-radical Dave Foreman, of Earth First!, today.)

Another example, the slavery apologist George Fitzhugh, who wrote the book Cannibals All! in 1857, imagined that only 1 in 10 people are fit to be masters, and everyone else should be slaves. He even romanticized the masters as having to work hard to maintain control over the slaves, and their “happy, carefree” life of servitude to the masters.

But for modern “deevolutionary socialists”, this has turned far more evil. Like Pianka, they have decided that the 90% of the Earth’s people cannot be made to obey, so the only alternative is to exterminate them. They likely imagine that the “elites” will then repopulate and redesign the Earth more to their liking, and more able to control the inevitable masses when they arise.

Every study has shown that people intent upon committing suicide will do so whether they have a gun or not! Were the gun confiscated by nanny staters, another method of killing themselves would be found.
But then, facts like these are not important to gun grabbers. Indeed, they get in the way of good excuses for gun confiscation!

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